Bouvard’s
poems are carefully crafted, rich
with imagery, and ringing with sound devices.

Marguerite Bouvard, a multidisciplinary
writer who has published sixteen books, including non-fiction works in
political science, psychology, spirituality, grief, illness, human
rights, also writes fine contemporary poetry. Her sixth and
newest full-length collection, The
Unpredictability of Light, touches on all her non-fiction
subjects, especially the political. Let me confess right now that
“I, too, dislike it, political poetry, that is,” to deliberately
misquote Miss Moore. Usually, I find it didactic and shrill,
smacking of over-earnestness and propaganda. But what makes
Bouvard’s work worth reading and re-reading is that she uses her lyric
gifts to make the political into poetry, not diatribe. She also
uses these gifts to address issues of ecology and the planet, her place
in her human family and in the family of man, the crucible of illness,
and our temporal place in history, both personal and public. In
doing so, she creates new fusions: the political-lyric, the
eco-lyric, the social-lyric, and the spiritual-lyric, and she does it
in a way that’s both original and memorable.
For one thing, “politics” seems to be too
restrictive a word to describe what she’s doing, as she’s casting a
much wider net. Mother Teresa said, “The problem with the world
is that we draw our family circle too small.” Bouvard’s circle is large
indeed; it encompasses her own family, with its European roots, and
includes history’s ugly lessons, from pre-Castro Cuba to World War II;
the post-911 present, with its unsolvable problems of immigration,
homelessness, the morality of torture, the Iraq war and its aftermath,
the dilemmas of Gaza and the Sudan, the bombings in London; and the
future, represented by her granddaughters. None of these, with the
exception of the last category, are the usual subjects of the lyric
gaze, but that’s the strength of this book.
“The New Barbarians,” for example, discusses how our
politicians lie
with language:

. . . Men
in well-pressed suits and
carrying briefcases
slipped from their high-rise
offices
and entered the wide open gates
of our city. . . . They spoke to
us
about new dangers. They
told us all
would be well now and we believed
them.
They spoke a language
we thought we understood,
assuring us
we would be safe now
from the barbarians far across
the world.

This use of language to spread fear and flame the fires against “the
other” speaks especially to our Orange Alert era. And yet even in
“a heightened alert,” where it seems “the enemy is everywhere,”
. . .a moment can redeem us:

. . . a pair of monarch
butterflies
swooping and weaving in tremulous
foreplay, then soaring above the
trees,
reminding us that we too are
citizens
of the sky, the wind, the light.
[“My Country”]

What is striking about this passage is how it acts as an antidote to
political cant, grounded as it is in the material and natural
world.

In “One Body,” we see that

Dawn embraces even those
who claim to stand apart:
commanders ramming their
bulldozers
into olive groves and peaceful
houses
because they were near the border

and it embraces even the ones “dragging naked prisoners / along the
dank corridors of their laughter.” Without an ounce of
preachiness, Bouvard takes the tender coming of the day, the black
deeds at Guantanamo, and lets them reverberate in the reader’s
mind, reminding us, “We are not separate; we are interdependent.”
(“The Buddha”)
This strategy is one Bouvard employs with great
effectiveness throughout the book, juxtaposition, or
point/counterpoint. First she gives you the setup:

. . . [a]small mountain town with
lyric fountains
and green squares, a main street
spangled with parfumeries, patisseries, artisanales

Then she gives you the contrast:

. . . But everything is
changing. On the back streetsKabobs
is splayed on the windows of the cafés,
and women in chadors hang out
their laundry
on cluttered terraces.
There is a Carrefour,
the French Wal-Mart, a city in
itself.

And then, the indictment:

And although the mountains spread
their wings,
there’s no room for Orhan, Fazil,
Nazim, or Saleh. . . .
teenagers caught between two
worlds,
wanting to be visible, wanting to
have their say.
[“Cluses”]

She doesn’t belabor the comparisons or hit us over the head with these
situations; instead, she invites the reader to draw her own conclusions.
Part of these conclusions leads us to think about
who is our brother. For even in paradise (“Maui”), when Bouvard
shows us “the sky’s drunken beauty,” the beach “alive with the smell /
of wood fire and grilled fish,” the world’s misery intrudes: “a
man with tangled hair” and “tattered shorts,” “the pages of his life /
written in a language only he can read.” This hopelessness “lays its
palm / on my heart like a burning coal.”
Using the language that we can read, Bouvard’s poems are
carefully crafted, rich with imagery, and ringing with sound devices:
“yellow silky petals seem like the only / angel wings among us.” (“In
Praise of Flowers”) Those l’s
melt the line, turn it from solid to
liquid. Or in another section, where the “uh” sounds pound like
horse’s hooves: “the ocean at dusk,” “the shush / of rustling
silk.” “No thunder / of breakers against the rocks, / no trucks
rumbled by with music thudding from open windows.” (“Reprieve”)
Through this kind of close observation, with a deep
knowledge of how the political is personal (quote often attributed to
Robin Morgan), Bouvard turns her attention to the planet, the plane on
which we exist. Here, the bees

. . . do not know the textconquer
and subdue,.
only the web and litany
of the Creation; stamen, pistil
hive, haven. . . .
. . .They whir intently
in their miniature engines,
circling above me. They mean
no harm. They do not poison
the air.
[“Balance”]

Bouvard knows “the delicacy of where to stop short.” (Frost), with a
language free of cant and rant; her goal is always poetry, not polemic.
This deep sense of the ecology cannot help but
overlap into the realm of the spiritual. “Who is to say that only
humans / can love? All night I heard the cow / bawling for her
calf.” Bouvard sees the hand of the creator in all beings:

. . . They
[the cows] are devout: they read
the book of the earth daily,
tamping down ridges
. . .to make a path
. . . They
shudder off flies,
bearing the brunt of endurance
under heavy rains.
They do not have to learn
patience.
They are not lesser in God’s eyes.
[“Dominion”]

And this spirituality owes no allegiance to orthodoxy or sect:

. . .when I’m
in the museum caught
in the light of Turkish
miniatures, my heart turns over
before a panel of vibrant black
characters, ‘God,’ they
flash even before I read the
translation. And when
the morning dove’s whoo whoo
sounds its tocsin beneath
my breastbone, it’s God’s voice
in the body’s nave, his
wings stirring the breath that
speaks all languages.
[“Names”]

She is the bird, God is the bird, we are the bird. In a world
that constantly tries to identify and segregate us, Bouvard is looking
instead for wholeness, for unity, for the ways we are alike.
The book is structured in three parts, “The World
that Flames Around Us,” which contains poems of the past, her mother
and grandmother, the family home in Europe, World War II, merging into
the present, with poems about the Congo, Cambodia, Iraq, the Sudan; the
second section, “The Hymn Beginning and Ending with Our Naked Flesh,”
deals more exclusively with the present, the “bone-chilling rain” of
the speaker’s illness (“March Rain”), loss, particularly of aging
relatives, and introduces the future, the granddaughter who “carries /
so many countries in her veins // [that she] also bears unclaimed
geographies,” (“Isabella”); and then the third section, “View from the
Future,” which pulls us into thinking about the world our children will
inherit.
Grace Paley reminds us, “There is no freedom unless
earth and air and water continue and children also continue”
(“Responsibility”), and this is Bouvard’s theme as well. She
imagines her other granddaughter going forth, wearing a “singlet of
eggs, my banners / of prayer” (“Ariel”) and that “all the grandmothers
are keeping watch, / their words hovering like wings.” Within
this chain of DNA and shared sensibilities, Bouvard imagines the
continuum of life on this planet.
The two concluding poems provide a powerful ending
to the collection. As Bouvard writes in the penultimate poem
(“As Dusk Fell”), “the pages of her book / burned with all she held /
within her heart.” She gives us the scope of history, both
personal and public:

. . . children sweeping
through the chapters like comets,
the faces of her forbears
surfacing like
cows in newly plowed
furrows
in Acquilea.

Then she concludes,

. . . Turning the pages she saw
corridors of rain, how even though
her book was slender it held such mysteries.

In the final poem, “The Important Thing,” Bouvard sets down a list of
instructions for the artist in our time, one who is finely tuned to the
suffering on the planet caused by war, poverty, and the degradation of
the ecology: Let “your hunger / turn into fields of gleaming
fruit trees.” Let “your frail and aging body / harbor a spirit
that dwarfs mountains.” Become like the woman

. . . in a Hungarian
prison whose birthday gift
to a cell mate was a rose made
of toilet paper. . . .
. . . Give randomly
and out of poverty, not knowing
whether the heart’s pale shoots
will create leaves or perish.

I hear echoes of Auden’s “we must love one another, or die,” here, and
also Martin Luther King Jr., “I still believe that standing up for
the unarmed truth is the greatest thing in the world.” Bouvard
believes this as well, and she also believes in the power of art to
transform, to heal the earth, and make it whole again.